


Each to His Own Lonely Grave

by ratrotriot



Category: Clone High
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Honestly? sorry I wrote this, Implied Sexual Content, Multi, Pining, Ponce is alive, Sad Ending, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Trigger warnings in authors note, it's also kinda morbid at points
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:46:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26986153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ratrotriot/pseuds/ratrotriot
Summary: Soulmates aren't all they're cracked up to be
Relationships: Cleopatra/Joan of Arc (Clone High), JFK/Ponce "Poncey" de León (Clone High)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 102





	Each to His Own Lonely Grave

**Author's Note:**

> I've kinda lost motivation writing for Operation Get Cleo Back (I'll finish it, I promise- just not right now) and my brain came up with Clone High Soulmate AU but then it got really sad and I'm... sorry?
> 
> This is really rambling and has little to no dialogue so it's different from how I normally write and I'm sure the tenses are wrong a lot n the timeline is nonlinear but I'm glad I managed to finish writing something.
> 
> The title is from The Sword & The Pen by Regina Spektor and if you haven't heard it yet I highly suggest you listen to it
> 
> //Trigger warning for brief mentions of violent deaths

**THE ARROW**

Cloning was weird, JFK thought.

How could it not be? First the corpse of some long dead- or not so long dead- person was dug up, their DNA was harvested- whatever that entailed- and then a mini them was grown in some lab in a tiny little town in nondescript American suburbia. It was weird all around.

The weirdest part though? The marks.

Maybe something had gone wrong in the cloning process, or it was another one of Scudworth’s weird experiments, none of the clones really knew. What they did know was that on a clone’s 16th birthday, a blackish-blueish mark showed up, showing them how their apparent soulmate’s clone parent had died. It was morbid, a constant reminder of your partner’s mortality, and yet there was something appealing about knowing the cloning process had made someone for you and you alone. Getting the mark was the easy part though, it was finding them that was the challenge. 

For some it was easy enough. Helen of Troy’s came in September. A clean, thin line severing her neck in two, like a delicate black filigree choker. It surprised absolutely no one when Marie Antoinette came into school on a cold November morning with a similar mark, this time rough, blurry, and bruised, an echo of the original Helen’s hanging. The pair wore their matching marks proudly; plunging necklines, curls of pinned up hair, and bare décolletages all designed to draw attention to their twin soul marks.

Cleo was one of the first in their grade to get a mark. She had been absent for a full week in October, right after her birthday. She came to school with a fuzzy black mark behind her ear, and JFK convinced himself that if he squinted at it long enough it looked like a bullet hole to the head. Evidently, Abe did the same. 

Something was wrong, though. Cleo no longer leaned into his touches, and he could feel the coating on her skin, and he doesn’t mention the times his hands came away from her body covered in copper foundation that stands out against the flesh of his palms. He just washes his hands and they wait until May, when a mark comes in that is not a snake bite, not even on his arm, and Cleo gives him a final kiss in parting. She’s with Lincoln the next week, who has a mark on his shoulder, though JFK knows that the spacing is wrong. He doesn’t mention that to Cleo, he has a feeling she already knows.

JFK’s is on his thigh, a small, thick rounded line maybe an inch long. He stares at a lot, wondering about it. A stab wound? From what? How could a stab to the thigh kill someone? He can’t wrap his head around it, so he lets the girls with splotches of black on their heads that he takes to bed do it for him. He’s used to it by now, he thinks as he lays alone at night, the look of disappointment in their eyes when they see the mark on his thigh that doesn’t match their DNA’s history. At some point he stops trying to match marks to the girls he sleeps with, and then he’s falling into bed with Marilyn Monroe, and she’s beautiful and they’re beautiful together, but who’s soulmate’s lips should be stained an equally beautiful shade of blue-black from a not-so-beautiful barbiturate overdose, and he’s got a lousy little line on his thigh. 

He tries not to hate his mark, he really does. He doesn’t have it as bad as he could. There are an unlucky few who don’t have a mark. Cloning is an experimental, imprecise science, and those without marks seem to take it in stride as best as they can. No one knows if they have soulmates or not, and if they do why it’s not visible on their skin. It’s a touchy subject. Joan of Arc loudly announced in January of freshman year that she’s markless, and no one ever shows up with their entire body covered in marks, so he believes her. She’s confident and self assured, hardly pitiably for her situation. 

But then they’re in bed after prom and and he’s holding her in the afterglow when he notices two freckles on her bicep- no not freckles. They’re too evenly spaced and too dark and it suddenly hits him that there is a perfect little snake bite on Joan of Arc’s thin little arm. She notices his gaze and her eyes go wide, frightened, then morph angry, and she hisses like the asp that killed Queen Cleopatra-

“JFK, don’t you dare say a word.”

And he doesn’t, just holds her tighter and then she’s crying, and then he is too, and they’re holding each other and crying after sex and he doesn’t know what’s sadder: knowing your soulmate is so very close and yet being unable to find them no matter how many partners you take, or knowing exactly who your soulmate is and it’s someone who covers their entire body in makeup every morning to avoid the fact that you were grown to be each other’s perfect match. 

Through all the girls and long nights alone, there is only one constant presence in his life.

Ponce doesn’t carry himself like someone who has a soul mark, but at the same time he doesn’t carry himself like someone without one. He just carries himself like… Ponce. But if Ponce has a mark, he hasn’t seen it. He thinks marks are bullshit, he says, but without any of the sadness of someone born without one. He says it like it’s a fact, like the sky is blue, like there’s air in his lungs, like there’s no fountain of youth. He doesn’t comment on JFK throwing himself at any woman who he has a chance with, but he’s there with cheap booze and smokes and laughter and jokes after every failed attempt at finding his perfect match. They sit quietly and look at the stars and in those moments JFK swears he feels almost whole.

**THE BULLET**

Ponce thinks soul marks are some kind of cruel joke. 

He had woken up that June morning, ran to the bathroom, and stripped. He searched every visible inch of skin twice over, and stood dumbly in front of the mirror when nothing turned up. School had just let out, Jack was on vacation, and he was alone in the house. Shaking, he sat on the bathroom floor and tried not to cry. By the time he sees Jack again, he’s pulled himself together enough that when asked about a mark he just shrugs and cracks an easy joke.

The second shock came when he was doing his hair on a Friday in August. He’s meeting JFK and going to a beach party, when his comb parts a section of hair on the top of his scalp. It’s a deep dark color, the color he’s been searching for, and his heart soars before dropping into the pit of his stomach, because whatever god or man decided to bestow soul marks has given him a reminder of a skull being blown open onto an adoring wife and cheering masses on a sunny day in Dallas, Texas.

He drops the comb in the sink, and then there’s a knock on his front door, and he’s smoothing his hair into a pompadour and schooling his expression to something neutral.

Jack is all easy smiles and bright eyes and tanned glowing summer skin. On the way to the party, Jack’s swim trunks ride up to mid-thigh, and there it is. 

Historians believe that while Juan Ponce de Leon was colonizing Florida, he invaded indigenous Calusa territory, sparking a skirmish that led to an arrow tipped in poison sap from the manchineel tree being driven into his thigh. 

There is a line on Jack’s thigh, rounded and thicker towards the middle, like what an arrowhead would make. Ponce swallows and stares at the road ahead of them.

The sand shifts under their feet. It’s dark, there’s a bonfire, and JFK is leading yet another girl away behind a sand dune and Ponce drinks too much. He comes back later that night and Ponce pretends not to see the glassiness in his soulmate’s eyes. They sit on the hood of his car and Ponce stares at the moon that Jack loves so much.

“I don’t think the marks are all they’re cracked up to be.”

Jack regards him softly, and there’s an arm being looped around his shoulder, and he’s being brought into Jack’s personal space. They lean into each other, looking at the stars reflect on the ocean and there’s something in that moment that Ponce feels. He smells like too much beer and Jack smells like sweat, and Ponce almost cracks at how perfect it is. But he doesn’t.

His soulmate has never shown interest in a man, he hasn’t ever considered the possibility of his soulmate being anyone other than a woman, and Ponce doesn’t know how he would react if he found out.

Ponce settles for what can get- a platonic soulmate. It hurts. But he would never, _could never_ leave Jack unless he told Ponce to go. So he sits there on the sidelines, waiting for something, anything, to happen.

Ponce feels himself fall in love.

**THE FIRE**

Cleopatra opened her eyes the morning of her 16th birthday and knew something was wrong. She stayed tucked into her overly plush bed and stared up at her perfectly unblemished white ceiling. Her alarm went off. She stayed in bed. The school called when she didn’t show up to her first class. She stayed in bed.

Finally, she ripped her gaze from the ceiling to the mirror across the room. Her breath left her body. Her face stared back, but in place of smooth tawny skin there’s a bulbous black burn mark from her jawline to her cheekbone, marring her perfect features. Sitting up, she raised a hand to her cheek, and with horror she realized it’s on her fingers and palm too, and trailing up her arm like smoke. The sheets slip from her body and she witnesses the echo of hot embers covering her thighs. 

Cleo screams, a broken thing, and balls her hands into fists, her manicured nails pressing crescent moons into her palms. Her life had been perfect. Sure, JFK could be thickheaded but he was _good_ , and they were good together. 

She spends the better part of the day cataloging everywhere her mark touches, and that week is spent finding ways to inconspicuously mask something that covers thirty percent of her body. Cleo knows what it means. She’s clever and quick, something that her soulmate doesn’t give her credit for. She presses her blackened fingertips to her eyelids until she sees white dots appear. _Her soulmate_. 

She finds another ghostly ember behind her ear. She leaves it uncovered and pretends that she’s suppose to be with JFK. Their bodies don’t slot together like they used to and he tastes wrong and it leaves her head spinning. JFK knows that something is different. She knows he feels it, but he doesn’t mention the coating of foundation and powder she wakes up 3 hours every day before school to apply. They sit together on his birthday, staring at his thigh, and the jig is up. Then she’s with Abe, who has some dots on his shoulder and it’s close enough that he believes they’re soulmates and she lets him. 

She can’t stop staring at her soulmate, though. The way her eyelashes flutter against her cheeks like a kiss, the sharp lines of her body, the way her dyed hair floats ethereal and saintlike around her face, the pain in her eyes when they come back from winter break and she pretends to be markless. 

Joan stares at Cleo like her eyes can see her bare skin, her bare soul, and if Cleo was a weaker woman she’d cry at the sight. Instead she holds her head high, royal and queenly, and Abe follows after.

**THE ASP**

It’s easier this way, Joan thinks. 

She didn’t see the mark at first, it was so small. She got out of the shower and wrapped herself in a plush towel, drying her dyed burgundy hair. Burgundy like in France, red like the wine that’s made there, like the wine she sips at church when she feels holy enough to go. 

There’s something on her arm and she wipes at it, but it doesn’t budge. Two small pinpricks of black, spaced evenly apart. It hits her like a slap to the face. She closes her eyes against the harsh light of the bathroom and for the first time in her life she curses God. 

Cleo should be covered in flames and smoke and embers, and yet her long legs and toned arms seem to stay pristine. She flaunts her behind the ear mark like it’s the holy grail. She’s with JFK, then when his mark doesn’t match hers, she’s with Abe. Her skin looks wrong though, like it’s painted on, and she interacts with the world carefully, like she could bruise at any moment, and Joan knows why. 

Joan watches her after her own mark comes in. She smiles and it’s like she has a nimbus of holy light surrounding her head, sainted like her own clone mother, like she has Ra’s sun disc haloing her. Her feelings for Cleo come unbidden. 

Cleo covers her mark, and Joan masks her feelings. No one questions her claims that she’s one of the few unlucky enough to not have a mark, and she swallows the looks from her classmates when they come. She changes quickly in the locker room, and her mark is small and subtle enough that no one notices.

She gives her virginity to JFK on a cold night in December, almost a year since her mark came in. He holds her and he _knows_ , but he doesn’t ask questions, and they spill their blue-black grief between them like they’re mourning a body. His nose buries into her hair and she can feel him let out a choked sob around her, and she wishes that he was her soulmate instead. 

There are days she wants to scream at Cleo. There are days she wants to push her against a locker and kiss her until they’re both breathless. 

She does neither. Cleo has made it abundantly clear that she has rejected her without so much as having a conversation. 

There are moments when she knows Cleo is staring at her across a classroom. She can feel her eyes watch her, and when they make eye contact across the busy hallway it’s like the world stops around them. There’s something in her eyes and she knows it’s regret, a silent, pleading apology to Joan. She bites her tongue, hard, trying to drown out the pain, but nothing is worse than Cleo acknowledging what she’s putting them both through. 

Joan sits quietly with her friends as Abe gushes about her own soulmate. She sits in the passenger seat of JFK’s convertible as he drives too fast, too recklessly, threatening to tip the car around every turn. She drinks the beer he gives her, and she tries to fake her way into teen happiness.

She thinks the original Joan would be ashamed if she could see her now.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!!! Sorry again
> 
> Also special thanks to everyone on insta that messaged me about this au!!!!


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